Morality

“Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.”

“There is a difference between what is wrong and what is evil. Evil is committed when clarity is taken away from what is clearly wrong, allowing wrong to be seen as less wrong, excusable, right, or an obligatory commandment of the Lord God Almighty.Evil is bad sold as good, wrong sold as right, injustice sold as justice. Like the coat of a virus, a thin veil of right can disguise enormous wrong and confer an ability to infect others.”

“Especially when it comes to animals used for food, humanity’s reasoning power and concern about fairness plummets.”

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”

“I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.”

“The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.”

“Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.”

“The law is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the due process clause, the courts will be very busy indeed.”

“Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.”

“We must remember that possession of physical beauty can easily weaken the moral faculty.”

“In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that human beings cannot be truly good or moral without faith in God and without submis- sion to the will of Christ. Unfortunately, Lewis does not provide any actual data for his assertions. They are nothing more than the mild musings of a wealthy British man, pondering the state of humanity’s soul between his sips of tea. Had Lewis actually famil- iarized himself with real human beings of the secular sort, per- haps sat and talked with them, he would have had to reconsider this notion. As so many apostates explained to me, morality is most certainly possible beyond the confines of faith. Can people be good without God? Can a moral orientation be sustained and developed outside of a religious context? The answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes.”

“By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”

“We can know what we do wrong even before we do it, but self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.”

“Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.”

“It's not enough, and so limiting, to teach the simplistic value of a designer's material wear. Give children the gift of values that will last far beyond [a] fad's temporal popularity.”

“Morality becomes hypocrisy if it means accepting mothers' suffering or dying in connection with unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions and unwanted children.”

“The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.”

“The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.”

“Shouldn't it be atheists, believing they are not being watched, who commit virtually all the crimes and fill up all the prisons, while people who believe in an omnipresent god lead spotless lives out of either respect or fear? But this is far from the world we see.”

“What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not to politicize morals.”